OpenSpace4Life

"Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public."
        - Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company internal memo

"Gate? What gate?"
        - The Monster in the Darkness, in the webcomic Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew

There's no use at this point trying to ignore "Climate-Gate" or claim it's somehow meaningless. The timing, so close to the opening of the Copenhagen climate negotiations, is highly suspicious, but if the emails were faked, the University of East Anglia would surely have said so. It seems likely enough that the hacker who "liberated" them waited until a politically propitious moment to release them to the world, but that doesn't change the importance of what they say.

On the other hand, it's foolish to claim, as countless conservatives are now doing, that the emails prove anything in particular about the future of climate change. What they do is increase the uncertainty. Scientists at one of several important climate research centers, frustrated by complex and inconclusive data sets and angry about the continued threats to their efforts to convince themselves their research was of epic global importance, made some very bad decisions that make them look like Michael Crichton villains. This does not prove that all the data on which the IPCC based its most recent statements about the likelihood that humans are warming the Earth is automatically discredited. It certainly doesn't mean we can use the recent tree-ring data, which for whatever reason flatly contradicts measurements from actual thermometers (and glaciers), to argue that the world has actually been cooling during the 20th century.

After all, science itself is not actually in the business of proving anything. A scientific "fact" is only accepted as long as no evidence comes along to falsify it, and no part of the scientific edifice is immune from that possibility. The basic theory of evolution, for example, is considered to be "fact" because we've seen enough evidence, in both the fossil record and short-life-cycle species living today, that supports it. The theory of anthropogenic global warming has been moving in the direction of fact for decades, had nearly reached it with the most recent IPCC report and its 90% certainty level, and has now taken a step in the opposite direction; how large a step is presently hard to say.

But as politically unfortunate as this may seem for progressives, and as much as people with little understanding of the scientific method may try to distort the situation with simplistic sound bites, the trend toward sustainability is far from over. Clean renewable energy, in particular, still looks like a good move to people living in areas prone to asthma from smog or cancer from oil processing chemicals, as well as windy or sunny regions with depressed job markets. For the U.S. government, pollutants other than CO2 ought to provide ample reason to maintain the moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. And as for the international community, it has basically already given itself a one-year deadline extension, so the massive ramp-up in the climate movement's activities during 2009 may yet have time to take greater effect, as well as adjusting its rhetoric to the ever-shifting, always approximate scientific picture of reality.

It's hard to make major policy decisions, or take decisive action of any kind, in an uncertain world. But as long as the Age of Reason lasts, we will have to continually face that challenge and balance the probabilities as best we can.

Speaking of famous Churchill quotes (though according to the linked page, Churchill claimed to have gotten this one from somewhere else): if you feel like a heaping helping of disillusionment, check out this post by bdunbar, summarizing what is probably the true story of Love Canal, despite the fact that Reason Magazine is the major source cited.*  The gist is that the company that produced the toxic waste was forced to sell the land by the threat of eminent domain, despite their objections that it was clearly unsuitable for building a school on.

The worst thing about this story is that the local government's "desperate" need for any available land was driven by the will of the people, specifically their desire to immigrate to Niagara Falls and/or have lots of babies.  Democracy sometimes leads to really stupidly short-sighted government actions, no doubt about it.  (Incidentally, Churchill thought short-sightedness is something we just have to live with.  I couldn't disagree more--some aspects of the future are definitely predictable enough to act on.)

To my mind, however, the best solution to keep this sort of thing from happening again is a policy of transparency/open government (see page 4 of the linked document), so when our elected officials are trying to do something ridiculous like build a school and a neighborhood on top of a toxic waste dump, it has to tell us that that's what it's doing.  That way we can stop it before it starts, rather than discovering what happened twenty-five years later, when the horrible consequences finally come into the open.

(Of course, limits placed on any conceivable transparency program in the name of national security mean that it won't help us prevent other outrages, such as government spying on Americans without a warrant.  For that, we'll still have to wait for a leak [pun only slightly intended] to the press, and then hope it's possible to embarrass our representatives into stopping it, or replace them with others who will.)

The other good solution to the specific problem of toxic waste, of course, is to make it food for another industrial process.

* The author of the Reason article admits that "Hooker Chemicals may very well have botched others of its many chemical dumps," and that "The customary practices [at the time] were to pile up such wastes in unlined surface impoundments, insecure lagoons, or pits, usually on the premises of the chemical factory, or else to burn the wastes or dump them into rivers or lakes."  But that's not what Hooker did at Love Canal.  (Okay, that sentence just sounds wrong...)


P.S. Things I did not know (earlier) this morning: Pi day (3/14) is also Albert Einstein's birthday.  I wonder if he was born at 1:59...

"Pollution is not, as we are so often told, a product of moral turpitude. It is an inevitable consequence of life at work. The second law of thermodynamics clearly states that the low entropy and intricate, dynamic organization of a living system can only function through the excretion of low-grade products and low-grade energy to the environment. Criticism is only justified if we fail to find neat and satisfactory solutions which eliminate the problem while turning it to advantage. To grass, beetles, and even farmers, the cow's dung is not pollution but a valued gift. In a sensible world, industrial waste would not be banned but put to good use. The negative, unconstructive response of prohibition by law seems as idiotic as legislating against the emission of dung from cows."

- James Lovelock, Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, which I have finally gotten around to purchasing and reading.

Link to version 1

Humanity is not just the passengers and crew of the Titanic.  We're also the primary forces--the iceberg and the cold ocean--that are bringing the ship down.

Yes, I've decided we're already sinking.  The iceberg was the Industrial Revolution itself, which has been tearing a wider and wider gash in the hull ever since, letting an ocean of dangerous chemicals pour into Nature and thence into our own bodies.  Unless we can throw together a lot more lifeboats, we're going down with the ship, which might also be named Gaia.

At this point, it looks like steering the boat away from the iceberg won't help much.  What needs doing is a crash effort to bail out the flooded areas and repair the leak.  That is, we need to clean up the existing mess we've made of our air, water, and soil and take drastic steps to ensure that we don't just mess it up again immediately.  Every "pollutant" that can be recycled into useful materials, should be.  Whatever's left should be buried as deep as possible or, preferably, launched into the Sun.

That's not to say I don't support the lifeboat idea too, but that's our emergency backup.  We should start building sealed-off, self-sufficient underground towns now so we can get the hang of it; the plus side is that future Mars colonists will need that skill too.  Are you listening, President Bush?